FAIRMONT – With the regular legislative session now over, Martin County’s state legislators, Senator Rich Draheim and Representative Bjorn Olson, have a lot to consider, both now and moving forward.

For Draheim, he said some of the bills he worked on got through, while some of them didn’t. Right now, he has a lot of reading to do to see some of what did pass through the extremely large, patched-together omnibus bills.

“I was chief author on 90 bills this session, so it’s kind of hard to track that,” Draheim said. “If you count those bills that I was a co-author, that would be a total of 121 bills that I was on, so that would be kind of hard to go through what made it and what didn’t.”

One of the biggest bills Draheim said he worked on this year was on establishing an Office of Inspector General. While it wasn’t as expansive as he would have hoped, given it’s the biggest thing he has worked on for the past two years, often every week, he said it is a first step he is grateful for.

“I was cleaning out my office a little bit, and I found an OIG bill I worked on back in 2019,” he said. “Sometimes you have to wait for the timing of things, and you have to debate, is it willing to take a base hit instead of a home run? I would say this is a double.”

As for why he was cleaning out his office, this was the last session for Draheim, as he is not running for re-election due to his beliefs in term limits.

“I just tried my best, and I’m grateful that people entrusted me for 10 years,” he said. “It’s time for me to move on, find a new challenge. We counted up how many bills I introduced over my 10-year period, and it was 1,237. A lot of them came from constituents that had issues that we worked on, and some of those bills were carried every session, trying to make a difference and change the philosophy on different topics.

While the session is over, Draheim has said that being a legislator is a full-time, year-round job. Before his term is over, he said there is still plenty left to do.

“[Tuesday] morning I spent all morning in classrooms talking to kids about drafting a bill, what it’s like to draft a bill, what rules we follow, what we do to get a bill passed, and the process,” Draheim said. “I’ll have a bunch of meetings like that throughout the rest of the year, where I’ll meet with different groups.”

For his district, including Fairmont, Draheim said measures passed for school safety and school funding, as well as some funding for rural hospitals, which were packaged with the Hennepin County Medical Center funding.

Overall, Draheim said his last legislative session saw far fewer bills pass than in past sessions.

“It was, I think, the least amount of bills passed that I can remember in 10 years,” he said. “There were things that everybody agreed on that did get passed. I didn’t think the process was helped by not having targets. You have to have a common goal, no matter where you are politically. We didn’t agree on that, and I think that limited what we were able to accomplish this year.”

In March, Olson was unsure of how much was going to get done, in part due to rising tensions, political ambitions of some members and an even split of Democrats and Republicans. With the session over, things panned out better than he expected.

“Behind the scenes, there was a lot going on with our leadership in negotiations,” Olson said. “That tied house seemed to be worked to our advantage in the fact that if we came up with an agreement in the house, then that was going to be the agreement. We didn’t see anything crazy major; we didn’t see any enormous wins. At the same time, I like to look at it as we didn’t lose any significant ground either.”

Instead of a special session or chaos at the buzzer, Olson said it felt more like a picture-perfect ending.

“Both sides of the aisle said, ‘You know what, we didn’t get everything we wanted, but we ended the game, we got it done, and the people are no worse off for what we’ve done,'” he said.

For what they were able to do this session, Olson included conforming to the federal tax bill from the One Big Beautiful Bill and Medicaid, no raising of taxes, sending $254 million back in car tab refunds after reversing the Democrat-led change to car tab fees, as well as instituting the Office of the Inspector General.

For Olson’s district, including Fairmont, he included modernization of human services technology, some of which had not been updated since 1989, roads and bridges funding, a piece of $21 million in school safety funding and some veterans’ benefits.

Looking over the session as a whole, and given it was only the second tied session in MN House history, Olson said everyone got along to do what’s right for Minnesotans.

“Not only did we successfully do what we had to do, which was fund the government and keep the wheels turning on the bus here, but we did it in a way where, yeah, there were obviously arguments,” he said. “But at the end of the day, when the gavel hit at midnight Sunday night, everyone stood up, clapped, looked at it and said, ‘Hey, we actually just did it. We did what we were mandated to do by the citizens of the state of Minnesota, and we did a pretty good job of it.'”